[WIP] Basic - a new skin in the works for XBMC

Griffith86 Wrote:Well, I planned on continuing working on the skin with psike but I guess he got busy and I haven't seen him since we last talked about moving forward with it. Though even if we had continued working on it I would have had to stop since I've been working on a lot of projects as of late.

At any rate, I'm releasing what we had done so far. It's still pretty rough but a lot of the core stuff is done. You are welcome to continue it here or do whatever you want with it, if you'd also like me to upload the PSD (which has stuff designed that hasn't been added to it yet), I can upload that as well.

I've created the same thing myself just now, Movies section with a few different views (only use one, but fun to learn), TVShows section (also with a few different views just for fun), Seasons and Episodes sections (same here), a home screen with recently added stuff and then the Video OSD (including the paused OSD, info OSD and buttons display ('m')) for Movies/TVShows.

Been at it for a month or so (not effective time though, that'd be like 15 hours or thereabouts). Like you I know HTML/CSS since before, and a little XML. Been playing around with other skins for a while, cut'n'paste mostly to see how things are done, but then tried to create my own. I used Confluence as a base, just to have all windows coded from the start (I tried with the empty skin but it's not dharma compatible). Nice to have settings coded if you need something changed for example. So, start hacking!

The wiki is great to find InfoLabels and conditionals, this forum is also a good source of information (not everything is on the wiki) - I search the forum using google though (site:forum.xbmc.org <query>) 'cause the built-in search function sucks. And look at other skins. Usually what you want has been done before.

Design wise it looks really nice, too! Looks like you're confident in PS. That's one of my big holdups - graphical design. Takes me five mins to whip up the code for something, and 30 mins to create any graphics I might need.

I was actually trying to make something similar to this last week, but got frustrated with my huge lack of graphics skill.
I really like the simplicity and focus on what's needed in a skin.. Plus it might be light enough to run more smoothly than eg. Xperience on my media center
I'm not a very experienced skinner, though...

I'm surprised how much I like this, its probably how clean your design work it is. I am only sceptical on a personal level because I think its to very hard to maintain consistency with fanart, and it appears your design relies on fanart. Although, on different levels so does mediastream, confluence, aeon and other skins.

I like the layout, but I'm not a fan of the blue/gold colour scheme. To me, htpc skins should be dark, as you usually watch movies/tv in dim lighting conditions/evening, and a bright theme is hard on the eyes.

TerranQ Wrote:I like the layout, but I'm not a fan of the blue/gold colour scheme. To me, htpc skins should be dark, as you usually watch movies/tv in dim lighting conditions/evening, and a bright theme is hard on the eyes.

Just my opinion though, looks nice

I was actually in the process of changing the color scheme to a black/gold theme to make the text easier to read which will be reflected shortly when I upload the new images.